What a lying sack of shit. So now, all of a sudden, he doesn't have a giant political team that briefs him on all the goddamn polls? That Axelrod diseased slug just goes "Hey, no idea dude, seriously, no idea."

There is nothing wrong with coverages now in place and free ER visits. The day the Democrat-socialists stop blocking real market reforms to keep a "Crisis" going to justify socialized medicine will be a better day. To surrender to these outgoing politicians tricks after the Scott Brown win is a truely cowardly act.

rhhardin: Trouble is will any of this awful legislation ever be repealed? Even if we vote out the Pelosi/Reid and Obama bunch next time, will their replacements have the guts to say: "About all that "free" healthcare stuff? Well we can't afford it and it has to go."

I still see some big holes in this strategy. The media keeps talking about this process as if the bill could somehow hop, skip and jump through all its opponents and emerge on the other side magically. I don't think that's what's going to happen. The public will have its say. Pelosi's sway over her party is markedly weaker, especially after she telegraphed her indifference to their careers. Reconciliation is probably the easiest part for them technically, but getting the House to trust the Senate not to fuck it up is another story.

I do think the gambit of running a progressive in Arkansas to pressure Lincoln will prove to be a blunder.

Once this passes, if it passes, it will NEVER be repealed. Name one large entitlement that has been repealed. One big reason for seniors swamping town hall meetings was the reductions in Medicare. Try discussing a rollback of Social Security with people (but be ready to duck).

No, once they get their foot in the door, the game is over. If you think this is a bad thing, stop whatever you are doing and call your rep's. Then EMail them. Then write a letter to them. Then attend any marches, town halls, and demonstrations you can.

If we don't do that. We're going to get this big lump of *****. Then we'll be hurtling even faster toward being ... Greece.

Trouble is will any of this awful legislation ever be repealed? Even if we vote out the Pelosi/Reid and Obama bunch next time, will their replacements have the guts to say: "About all that "free" healthcare stuff? Well we can't afford it and it has to go."

C'mon, you should know the drill by now. Some moderate maverick like McCain will create a Gang of Seven and they will compromise their compromises. And then trade away everything for the promise of future negotiations.

So now, all of a sudden, he doesn't have a giant political team that briefs him on all the goddamn polls?

Of course he has. Every politician has. But that doesn't mean you listen to them. After all, if you listened to the polls, you'd pass all the popular bits of the bill (e.g. guaranteed issue, massive subsidies -- the stuff that voters can tell themselves means other fools get stuck with the bill for their expensive health care), and leave the mess for someone else. And it's perfectly legitimate to resist voter pressure to do that kind of thing.

But when voters are made aware of the costs and benefits -- as I think they have been, in this case, thanks to the long debate which started after the President tried to declare the debate over last summer -- and public opinion is sharply against a change, politicians really ought to give that a lot of weight. They're our servants, after all, not the other way around.

"So does anybody have any idea where the House stands votewise on the necessary 216?"

I've seen online analysis that they're anywhere from 5 to 15 votes short in the House (with the wildcard being, how many Dems were given a pass to vote "no" the first time who MIGHT toe the line for the party this time).

Other important Q: what benefits kick in right away to make this a beloved, entrenched program from the outset? Because the revenues are front-end loaded (which means taxes & fees right away); the benefits are back-end loaded to get a trick CBO score that it doesn't break the bank.

Dig deep into those pockets. We're all Marxists now. You'll begin to appreciate all the Che imagery of this administration. You'll kick yourself for empowering a man that you knew followed Saul Alinsky.

Other welfare programs were quite popular when passed. Outside of the inbred yokels still hanging on Obama's nut sack, who likes this abortion of a bill? Forcing thru hated legislation will get it killed.

Well, when you get people like our esteemed hostess voting for marxists, stuff like this is bound to happen.

The republicans are terrible people and terrible polticians, by and large. Since Reagan they only seem to nominate for president people who are either unable to lift their arms above their heads, or are inarticulate.

McCain may be a gnome, and I don't have much good to say about him, but he is not a marxist. Socialist? Absolutely, even more than the two Bushes, but he is not a marxist bent on destroying our nation.

The political conflict in our nation, indeed in the entire western civilizaiton if not the world, has been the same since about the turn of the last century: Socialism and marxism against freedom and capitalism. The marxists have been hiding their agenda and pretending that their interest is in civil rights and such, while they have been steadily eroding our freedoms. Now we are at the point of exponential steps towards their goals and we're pretty much doomed for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Althouse is not solely responsible, of course, but she is partly responsible. I'm still waiting for the mea culpa.

And the normal way to reconcile the House and Senate bills is to go through conference, not reconciliation. Conference is where the Senate and House name members to a committee that comes up with a NEW bill (based, usually, on language from the Senate and House bills). The NEW bill coming out of conference then needs to voted on by each chamber. Meaning, the NEW bill would need 60 votes to get out of the Senate.

Reconciliation, on the other hand, allows certain bills to avoid the normal Senate rule that requires 60 votes to end debate. Reconciliation is supposed to be reserved for budget and tax bills. The HCR bill is neither.

The republicans never should have used reconcilation. It just opens the door for this type of stuff.

Republicans never used reconciliation for anything other than budget and tax bills -- which were at the time and always have been consistent with Senate rules covering reconciliation.

Note: Republicans threatened to approve judicial nominees on a simple majority vote basis. (This was the so called Nuclear Option.) Their argument was the Constitution requires the Senate to advise and consent to a judicial nomination and the use of a filibuster to prevent a vote on a nomination was thought to be inconsistent with that Constitutional mandate.

It actually hasn't passed both chambers, garage. If it had passed both chambers, then it would be on the President's desk already and he could sign it. Different versions have passed each chamber. In any number of areas (including abortion funding), the versions are VERY different. So it's 100% inaccurate to claim that "it" has already passed both chambers, because neither chamber has yet agreed with the other on "it".

Congress doesn't vote on or pass general ideas. It votes only on actual, specific bills, with actual, specific, legally enforceable language.

garage, why don't you ask Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid why they haven't formed a conference committee to reconcile the two bills in accordance with the normal and traditional practice of Congress. The answer is that they don't think they can pass the bill if they do that.

That's why they're looking to use parliamentary tricks, like reconciliation, to ram the bill through, because they know that they can't get 60 votes in the Senate for any version of the bill the House is likely to agree to.

when you get people like our esteemed hostess voting for marxists, stuff like this is bound to happen... Althouse is not solely responsible, of course, but she is partly responsible. I'm still waiting for the mea culpa

I think Athouse is one of many who ignored obvious danger signs because she wanted to elect America's first black president.

It's not smart of Obama to make his sugar-daddy mad at him. He failed to nationalise the banks. Another Failure in this bankruptcy of the dollar guided missile bill will not be acceptible to Dr Soros and his evil cat sitting on Soros's pile of short sold US Bonds.

"Liberal logic," Hoosier? What logic do you operate with? That liberals should all shut up and die, right?

Project much? No but I wish if you did open your mouth you'd at least make an effort of making sense occasionally. Obama had an opportunity to provide a mechanism to cover the uninsured from bank breaking catastrophic illness. But rather than take measured steps to address the issue, he just said I won and figured the seas would part.

Teapartiers and conservatives would always compromise with the left if they were in power, right?

Funny thats pretty much what Bush, his father and Reagan did to fairly good effect. Then again they possessed leadership qualities, something the current occupant apparently lacks. As his evidenced by his own party fragmenting on the issue.

I always wonder how all these wingnuts ever came up with the idea that they speak for "the American people." I'm an American person, as are all of the people I know that support this bill.

While I don't like the term, because it tends to add more heat than light to the discussion, "unamerican" means an idea that is inconsistent with the principles upon which this country was founded -- as articulated in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. HCR, with it's mandate that everyone buy insurance, et al, is (at least arguably) in conflict with these founding principles and is therefore unamerican no matter how many American's may agree with the bill. In this way, spaghetti, tacos, and chow mien could all be called unamerican foods, even though many Americans enjoy them.

Yeh, the guy without any credentials to show that he can do succesfully executive, or any other, job managed to get elected to the highest office in the land and now claims that he does not know how politics work?

The Bush tax cuts were pretty major, and faced a good bit of opposition. Perhaps they fall under proper use of reconciliation ... but it still reeks of laying the groundwork for this sort of abuse.

Knox, perhaps Bush should have worked harder to get more bipartisan support for his tax cuts. Recall, however, he only had 50 Republicans in the Senate (until one switched parties, giving a majority to the Democrats). He did get some support from the other party, just not enough for 60 votes.

My complaint is the Democrats are trying to blur an important distinction. They are claiming Republicans used reconciliation and trying to get the uninformed to think what they are doing is legitimate. That's like claiming that, since I drive my car, it's alright for my neighbor to drive my car (without my permission). I have a right to drive my car; my neighbor does not. It was within Senate rules to use the reconciliation process to pass the Bush tax cuts; it's not to pass HCR.

The Democrat's approach is similar to their arguments about filibustering judicial nominations. Democrats spoke eloquently about the need of the filibuster to prevent a majority from ignoring the minority. They pointed out Republicans often used the filibuster themselves. In all their speaking they tried to hide the fact the filibuster had NEVER been used to judicial nominees before. Not ever in 200 years of history. (Filibusters had been threatened when an ethical concern came to light after a nominee had been voted out of committee, but the filibuster had not been used nor had it been threatened over policy differences.) What the Democrats did was a dramatic expansion of the use of filibusters and they got away with pretending it was nothing more than business as usual.

Well in terms of deficit to GDP and debt to GDP, we're sure as hell getting damn close in terms of percentanges. The reason Greece is weak now is because no one's buying their debt! What happens when China says 'we'll pass' at the next treasury auction?

I'm a little more optimistic than you all.

Seriously Madison Man, how much more borrowing can we do before our treasuries are worthless? Can you honestly say you're optimistic when the federal deficit is over $1.5 trillion and expected to get higher. Really? Cause in my book that's long past being optimistic and fast approaching denial. I mean we could eliminate the ENTIRE defense budget and we'd still have a $1 trillion deficit.

Did anyone ever take a goddamn accounting class in high school and learn the concept of compound interest?

If Health Care Passes every wart in the health care arena will be blamed on it and rightly so. Democrats forced this disaster upon the American people and thus they deserve all the blame. Any denial of care any increase in health care costs will be blamed on Obama and the democrats for stuffing something no one wanted on us.

The reason why its so toxic is that the bill will affect EVERY one in the country. And most of the people will be losers - i.e. the 87% who currently have insurance who now have to cover the 13% who do not.

Moreover, once the Dems use reconciliation to pass health care, it can be used to undo health care. Now that reconciliation has been used for health care, it can be used for everything.

What prevents the House, if it turns Republican next year, from simply not funding any of these programs in the budget bills. Now that Obama has gone extreme in partisanship, then extreme partisanship will be the norm for the future.

I heard someone say the other day that the one bright side to aObama is that the faster Liberalism peaks, the faster will be the demise of the liberal state. The only end-game for the Left's utopian dream is collapse of the state. You cannot pay back the debt without cutting the welfare state. You cannot increase the welfare state without taking on more debt. Thus, our future is most certainly massive inflation as the gov. prints money and then bankruptcy, which will destroy all the wealth of the country.

I am envisioning Obama on our first Trillion Dollar bill. I think it will happen uin our life-time

The Bush tax cuts were pretty major, and faced a good bit of opposition. Perhaps they fall under proper use of reconciliation ... but it still reeks of laying the groundwork for this sort of abuse.

The big differnece though is that you generally need a partisan divide to mount a sustained opposition. With all other prior reconciliations, there was significant bi-partisan support for the procedure. In this case, there is no republican support. Thus, the fight will be ugly. So ugly that if the Dems win, they will do so using new and unconventional methods (such as Joe Biden overuling everything). This will then set the standard for new norms in Congress. Everything will become very partisan.

It takes 217 votes to get this through the House, and Nancita doesn't have 217 votes right now. The Senate bill doesn't include the Stupak ammendment (which was the only way that she got Stupak and roughly 10-12 other Dems to vote for this monstrosity), and there is no chance at all that it will be added to reconcile the bills in the Senate (her words, not mine). The Dems are doing a kabuki dance for the benefit of their base so they can claim 'we tried', but it is little more than that...

What happens when China says 'we'll pass' at the next treasury auction?

Same thing that happens when Mom and Dad takes away Susie's credit card.

However, we're not going to default or cut spending but most likely inflate our way out of the debt we have accumulated. At this point, inflating out of our current debt structure will make the Carter era look like a picnic. This is exactly what all the gold sellers are counting on for business so perhaps MadisonMan's optimism is based upon the amount of gold he owns :-)

The recent hoopla Obama has made about health insurance premium increases in California is a good indicator of what lies ahead if Obama's health care bill becomes law on a partisan bare majority vote. After it becomes law, every populist point can and should be blamed on the new health care bill. Every policy increase, every denial of care, every limitation in benefits, every abortion. Everything, because Obama has said his bill will solve everything.

This is going to be a disaster for democrats. What used to be blamed on evil insurance companies will become property of the government and because it was a partisan bill - property of the Democrats. Just like the Iraq war ills were blamed on Republicans (even though 25 Dems supported it). Except with the Iraq war - it comes to an end. The health care debacle will never end, until it finally gets legislated away.

Look here Garage: A bill has passed the House, but that very bill has never been voted on by the Senate. The Senate wrote a different bill and voted on its own law.

The Senate has not voted on the House Bill and the House has not voted on the Senate Bill.

So don't try that sleight-of-hand shit here, dude.

And neither the House, nor the Senate, has voted on Barack Obama's latest .pdf file (it's not organized enough to be an actual bill) to alter our health care system.

If Democrats want to pass this massive tax increase using reconciliation in the Senate, then let them fucking try it, dude. Harry Reid controls the calendar in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi controls the calendar in the House. Let's fucking vote if your side has the stones.

Because they don't.

Once they vote, and if they pass this shit, that's not the end of it, buddy. Just know that.

We're then going to have a referendum on that come November of 2010 and I'll be voting only for Congressmen who assure me that they'll repeal whatever massive tax increases on health insurance the Obama Administration rams through the Congress using their reconciliation trick in the Senate.

Whatever health care bill Barack Obama rams through the Congress can be rammed right back up his ass by fucking repealing it.

I always wonder how all these wingnuts ever came up with the idea that they speak for "the American people." I'm an American person, as are all of the people I know that support this bill.

Do you dispute the accuracy of the polls? It hasn't been a close question for a long time. Obamacare in either House or Senate flavor has no better than 1/3 of the voters favoring it. The most recent CNN poll had only 25 percent wanting the bill passed.

If you do dispute such polls' significance, i.e. you think we didn't send our reps to Washington just to follow the polls, did you dispute them when polls turned against the Iraq war, and were cited repeatedly by the war's foes as a perfectly reasonable rationale for the U.S. to pull out, damn the consequences?

garage, your are a fool. Have you read this 2700 page atrocity? Or are you looking for an entitlement freebie? You refuse to make more money to buy better coverage.

Mandatory insurance with financial and criminal penalties? Insurance is an intangible consumer product. What right does the government have to force anyone to buy a product. Oh, and spare us the false car insurance analogy.

Health insurance is not a right or a privilege, it is a product. What next, forced life insurance? ForcedMandatory savings accounts- yes, garage, they are products too. Maybe the government will force us all to buy GM cars to help the auto company it owns.

They are ramming a vote on a bill that three quarters of the public, the citizens, the voters do not want. Only entitlement slackers like you are cheering this on.

What is going to happen if the Republicans get in, get courage and repeal the whole bill through an up or down vote or reconciliation. It could happen and it should happen.

Nancita says a lot of things, some of which might even be true. She is hardly likely at this point to say that she doesn't have the votes, and that The One(tm) had better learn real compromise if he wants anything to pass. The only way to play this is to bluff, and hope that enough of your own people decide that they want to be on the winning side (or what they can be bluffed into believing is the winning side) before the vote happens. Standard negotiating tactic, little more...

This will be useful for fundraising (you are most correct), and it has some potential for keeping the troops spirits up, but without the Stupak ammendment and with the deteriorating political climate for HCR, this bill isn't going anywhere...

Whatever health care bill Barack Obama rams through the Congress can be rammed right back up his ass by fucking repealing it.

Just remember that kid.

While I agree with your sentiments (if not how you expressed them), I think it only fair to warn you and the rest of the country that Obama can veto any repeal. Unless the backlash against this bill is so great Republicans get a veto proof majority, Obama will be able to keep his HCR in place until at least another Presidential election. By then, a lot of the damage done by the bill will be irreversible. That's what the Democrats are counting on.

At the same time if there are forty things in a bill and a huge price tag and I disagree with 38 of those items and choke on the price tag, please don't take two of my ideas, put them in the bill and declarebipartisan!

As much as I understand the political rationale for just say no it should be noted there are significant policy and budgetary reasons for Republicans to say no to the bill.

Finally, if opposition to the bill gets Democratic support (i.e. some Democratic senators or representatives vote against it) can it not be said that the opposition is a bi-partisan opposition.

It seems to me that neither Monty nor Garage understand the legislative process--at least judging by their comments about "the health care bill." Which health care bill? Hasnt been produced by a conference committee--and which bill will go thru reconciliation should them dems try that track?

And if Ms Pelosi had the house votes as she claims this would have already been a done deal--she doesnt have them, and all the rest is Kabuki for the dem base.

Understand that if the Dems pass this bill they will own the entire health care system. You will have achieved health care reform. And from that moment forward every problem and horror story will be pinned on the reform and the Democrats. Health care reform will no longer be a winning issue for Democrats. It will be a club that is used to beat them senseless in every election from dog catcher to the Presidency.

The Senate bill doesn't include the Stupak ammendment (which was the only way that she got Stupak and roughly 10-12 other Dems to vote for this monstrosity), and there is no chance at all that it will be added to reconcile the bills in the Senate (her words, not mine).

The way I understand it, reconciliation changes can be made only to items that affect the deficit -- revenues or spending. I don't believe that the Stupak Amendment could be presented under reconciliation even if they wanted to -- which, of course, they don't.

I don't see where Pelosi gets the votes. The Senate version trashes the protections against abortion funding from the Hyde Amendement, and I just can't see Stupak et al voting for it - ever.

Obama will be able to keep his HCR in place until at least another Presidential election. By then, a lot of the damage done by the bill will be irreversible. That's what the Democrats are counting on.

It's my understanding that none of the benefits - the coverage kicks in until 2013. But, the additional taxes, etc... kicks in immediatly. Thus, there will be lots of taxes for the next two years with no benefits. You think Obama will be looking good for 2012 on that?

if Health Care Passes every wart in the health care arena will be blamed on it and rightly soAnd that's the politics of this bill that I don't get. We knew quite some time ago that the majority of Americans were satisfied with their healthcare. And now we know that, for better or worse, majority of Americans are not in favor of this bill.

It seems almost guaranteed to piss of the electorate. If I have to wait 30 minutes on hold when calling my insurance company its Obamacare's fault; if my doctor can't get me in for another month its Obamacare's fault; if the cost of my diabetes medicine goes up....you guessed it Obamacare

And the final irony, a smart Republican could respond when hearing those complaints by saying Oh don't worry, the hard stuff starts now. All of the good stuff will come IN FOUR SHORT YEARS! So be patient and read a magazine or something. The doctor will be with you in a moment

Even if Nancita can twist harder than Ahnuld on an adrenaline rush, there is a limit to how much you can threaten people. Stupak and company don't strike me as the sort who are going to be deterred, especially since it is extremely unlikely that Nancita will be in any position after Nov to make good on her threats.

It seems almost guaranteed to piss of the electorate. If I have to wait 30 minutes on hold when calling my insurance company its Obamacare's fault; if my doctor can't get me in for another month its Obamacare's fault; if the cost of my diabetes medicine goes up....you guessed it Obamacare

I agree. The drum beat will be constant and unstoppable because so much of the downside to Obamacare will be experienced personally by 87% of the population rather than reading about someone else or about statistics in the newspaper.

And because it was all jammed through by partisan liberal democrats using a trick in the Senate, Democrats will be blamed totally for the faults of the system. The only hope for Democrats is that all the old democrats get voted out so the new democrats can blame the old democrats (like the do today with Slavery).

In UK and Canada, everyone constantly criticizes their health care systems, but the criticismonly goes so far because overall they were instituted legitimately by their ancestors. With Obamacare, it will all be illegitimate.

He can't sell the idea based on fiscal responsibility, reduced societal or personal medical cost or improved service. He can't even really demonstrate that it will cover those who are not covered now in any effective way. So he tells us, after all this time of failing to make his case, that it's some moral imperative.

Anecdotal evidence, but my wife's OB/GYN is pretty adamantly against this healthcare "reform". Considering the dearth of qualified OB's in the country these days, I'm not sure how smart it is to be pissing them off.

How easily the ideologues talk about what the "American people" want and don't want. In particular If I had a just a $1 tax return for every time I heard an ideologue say some version "The American people don't want this health bill!"

I'm one of the American people. I want this health bill. And I say ram it down their throats if you have to. I'll support you.

Some commentators on this thread have written that nothing is ever repealed. Apparently they've never heard of the 21st amendment.

The MSM has, fallaciously, been suggesting for years that Republicans have a "litmus test" for candidates. Now it's time for there to be a real litmus test -- every Republican primary candidate needs to affirm that he or she will vote to repeal ObamaCare just as soon as Republicans have a majority.

If the bluff strategy works, they would have the votes, and thus no face-saving would be necessary.

If the bluff strategy does NOT work, Obama will look like a fool, but I don't imagine that will bother Nancita terribly much, as she is no doubt quite sure that he can do so without her help.

Seriously though, it is a mistake to see the Congresional and Presidential wings of the Democratic party as an immutable whole, joined at the hip. They have different interests (Obama doesn't face the voters till 2012, Nancy wants to keep enough of the base engaged to avoid losing control of the House in Nov, for instance), and will sometimes work at cross-purposes.

My best guess (and I am certainly as easily wrong as anyone else) is that Nancita will stall out somewhere around 212-214 votes. If she thought that she had enough to push it through, they would have been voting yesterday...

Seriously though, it is a mistake to see the Congresional and Presidential wings of the Democratic party as an immutable whole, joined at the hip. They have different interests (Obama doesn't face the voters till 2012)

[New interim House Ways & Means' chair, Pete Stark's] major achievement was the Catastrophic Health Care Act of 1988, which created a new benefit for Medicare recipients, but then was repealed by an overwhelming vote in 1989 after an outpouring of public protest: the problem was that its tax on the high-income elderly was very unpopular while benefits seemed puny.

So, the Catastrophic Health Care Act is a good example of how even new entitlements can be undone if they are unpopular enough.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday laid out a path forward for passing health care legislation that wouldn’t require House Democrats to first swallow a Senate plan that they largely oppose.

Details are still in flux on the procedure that Democrats will use to deliver a health care bill to the president’s desk. The assumption has been that the House would first need to pass the $871 billion Senate bill, which would then be signed into law, and then followed by a package of fixes through the reconciliation process to appease House Democrats.

Hoyer said that while the House is constitutionally required to initiate reconciliation bills, that doesn’t mean the House would have to pass the Senate bill first before passing a reconciliation bill to amend it.

“We could pass the reconciliation first, have the reconciliation passed by the Senate and then pass the Senate bill,” Hoyer said. From there, he said, the president would have to sign the Senate bill first and then the reconciliation package.

I'm still trying to figure out how I can use my Obamacare benefits at my home in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil sells me drugs cheap without prescription and even sends around a young woman to check up on me and entice me to visit the local clinic. I'm just a tourist there, but they treat me better than Amerikan medical "care" ever did.

Now Obama wants me to pay for the negligence and inattention to my needs?

Unless my understanding of the reconcilliation process is completely mistaken (and that is certainly possible), it isn't possible to vote on a reconcilliation package before a bill is passed because the package refers to changes in the original bill. Hence the package passed would have no substance as it would proffer changes in something that does not yet exist...

If the Senate is disinclined to try to 'fix' abortion issues in reconcilliation, I hardly think that they would go along with this...

Notice none of our little Lefties disagree in the slightest from the party line? And these are the ones who keep telling the rest of us how they know better and are smarter than all us Althouse Hillbillies put together, you betcha!!

Triangle Man said...

Isn't that how a republic is supposed to work? Elected officials make decisions on our behalf.

I'll bet you were sick the day they discussed that whole 'consent of the governed' concept.

rdkraus said...

Once this passes, if it passes, it will NEVER be repealed. Name one large entitlement that has been repealed. One big reason for seniors swamping town hall meetings was the reductions in Medicare. Try discussing a rollback of Social Security with people (but be ready to duck).

Keep a couple of things in mind. There will be ten years of taxes before benefits kick in and the Demos won't control the debate the way the did in the days of the Fairness Doctrine. The playing ground is a little different this time.

Sloanasaurus said...

I heard someone say the other day that the one bright side to aObama is that the faster Liberalism peaks, the faster will be the demise of the liberal state. The only end-game for the Left's utopian dream is collapse of the state. You cannot pay back the debt without cutting the welfare state. You cannot increase the welfare state without taking on more debt. Thus, our future is most certainly massive inflation as the gov. prints money and then bankruptcy, which will destroy all the wealth of the country.

I am envisioning Obama on our first Trillion Dollar bill. I think it will happen uin our life-time

Not disagreeing, but you do realize you're talking Weimar Republic? It may happen, but it's not something to be wished for.

WV "palgal" What Pelosi Galore would have done if she hadn't gone into politics.

Hoyer said that while the House is constitutionally required to initiate reconciliation bills, that doesn’t mean the House would have to pass the Senate bill first before passing a reconciliation bill to amend it.

I'm still trying to learn how budget reconciliation part works.

I'm wondering why Hoyer is detailing that double back flip with a half gainer....

Why go through that tortured process if there isn't something to be gamed.

btw-Obama just nominated to the Appeals Court the brother of one of the undecided.

What I do know is that if the bill can be enacted via budget reconciliation, that's the end of the filibuster. If budget reconciliation can be used for something like this, it can be used for anything.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it does mean we'll have a completely majoritarian Congress for the first time ever. Passing laws (or repealing existing laws) will get a lot easier than it used to be.

That the 15% currently without health coverage will vote straightline Dem the rest of their lives?

The people I know who currently lack health insurance are pissed off about this bill, too. This is because they are split into two groups: those who don't want to pay for health insurance, and those who can't.

It is possible that the latter group can be bought off, if Congress gives them money for health care up front and that money covers what they consider to be a sufficient amount of the cost. Neither of those things is likely to happen. But even if both happen, the *first* group is still going to loathe the Democratic Party.

I don't think that Pelosi has the votes. I just don't see her having enough votes in her pocket (i.e. that were allowed to vote nay last time) to offset the dozen or so who Stupak has following him on the abortion issue. Indeed, even without her Stupak problem, I suspect there are a lot of Red and Purple district Representatives who are thinking of flipping their votes so that they might have a chance at reelection. Small, but still a chance.

But if it does pass into law, I see Obama having guaranteed himself a single term. Just imagine the Republicans running against him in 2012 using the fact that the only way to get rid of the law is to get rid of him, because of his veto. And there is going to be almost no support for the law at that time, since the costs are front loaded, and the benefits back loaded, until after the 2012 election.

So, I think that there is a high probability that if the bill passes into law, that the Republicans can, and will, gut it in 2013. They will likely have a majority in both Houses of Congress, and what was passed into law through reconciliation, can be revoked by the same means.

Oh, and does anyone remember that the Senate version has, or least had, a provision requiring a super-majority to overturn it by a later Congress? I think that has as little sticking power.

The way that this turns into a permanent entitlement and constituency is through the subsidies. Those who get help from the government paying for their health insurance will presumably ultimately turn into the type of constituency that the Democrats are looking for with this bill. The obvious problem with this is the timing - the subsidies aren't going to kick in soon enough, and so that additional taxes are going to be more important in the next two elections than the subsidies would ultimately be.

The 15% figure of people without health care is bogus. It comes from nowhere. Further, no one knows how many million people just refuse to buy health care insurance for whatever reason- exercising THEIR right to spend THEIR money as THEY see fit.

Health Insurance is a commodity. It is not a right. It is not a privilege. It is a product.

They are lying about the numbers all the way around. Since when has any government agency used accurate numbers. This whole health care bill is just one big fairy tale.

I don't know how many pro-lifers you have dealt with, but the ones I have run across (and that includes many on the Hill) aren't really big into compromise on things like this. Hence part of Stupak's constituents might be unhappy about not getting govt healthcare (that is likely to be a lot less than 50%) but the pro-life part (closer to 50%) is likely to be livid.

Take it from a game-theorist...he has no inclination to walk it back...

So, now majority vote = "ram through"? Remember that the next time Republicans have the majority.

If this is "Rahmed" through, I think that the Republicans will, indeed, remember it the next time they are in the majority and the Democrats try to filibuster anything. Another post office or highway named after Bob Byrd (D-KKK)? Filibuster, etc.

For all the people screaming that the federal government must do something, are you screaming even louder for your state government to do something? Why not? Why the resistance to federalism? Why not simply have the federal government do only what the plain language of the Constitution delegates to them?

Why not try different things in different states and see what works? (It's obviously not urgent since even Obama's plan doesn't kick in for four years.)

are you screaming even louder for your state government to do something? Why not?

I suggested as much back when I was actually blogging. I noted that if Wisconsin had state-funded health care, it would be a draw for Companies moving here -- they would not have to foot the bill for their employees' health care (Not directly, anyway). This was back when GM was closing the Janesville plant.